Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

So that's a dozen people. 1900 is more than a hundred times that. (#mathFTW)

These cuts will seriously hurt product.

Also, I sense my less-than-new windows version will be unsupported; and I only had it so the one game ran better.

In this case, it kills unproductive jobs. Payroll people are necessary but at the end of the day, they don't produce anything you would want to buy. This means that if you keep more administrative jobds than you need, there will be fewer actuall things to go around. Hence everyone will be poorer on average (or realistically speaking, the rich will be poorer in the current system, but that is a different issue).

Anyway, keeping unproductive jobds to reduce unenployment is a dumb idea and is one of the main reason why communism sucked so much.

Similar to 2008 but the 1% found out a way to keep their wealth intact while still fucking everyone else over.

ActiBlizz finance, accounting, HR, etc is no longer needed. Microsoft already has all those needs covered.

That's not 1900 people, that's like 50.

I've been part of these before; they cut by pay. Junior artist? You stay. Senior artist? Bye. It goes all the way down to QA. A place I used to work at had massive layoffs, and were left with a QA team of 15 whose most senior member had 6 months in the industry.

This is phase 2. Phase one was last year when they laid of 10,000. those were the finance/accounting/etc people. This is specifically the games area which at this point, according to my friends caught in said layoff, says it’s mostly seniors across all (gaming) divisions.

EDIT: To be clear to the downvoters: 1. I worked at Microsoft (gaming) 5 years ago, and was caught in one of these layoffs. 2. It won't be areas like accounting/HR/finance because that was last year. I know people caught in these layoffs, and it's seniors in each department.

Microsoft uses, especially in Canada, a system to bypass hiring full-time employees, which they have to do here legally after 5 years of employment every X years (I forget how many). They hire from 3rd party contractors, and then refuse to rehire you after you've worked 4+ years, until a six month gap has occurred and you change 3rd party vendors. They do this with over half of their employees, so their gaming division has a TINY HR department because most of the staff don't technically work for Microsoft. I met 'our' HR at a meeting shortly before we were all laid off, and had never had any contact with any of them (nor anyone in payroll, etc, because that was all done by our 3rd party vendors.)

We're in open-season mode for AI at my day job. No one's being replaced by AI.

It's a great tool for code/copy generation, but it gets so much wrong that now we're both coders and qa for bots feeding us scaffolding code.

Yeah man the communist gaming industry is absolutely booming right now.

You don’t get rich paying a ton of people 200k.

You literally do, though. Because wealth isn't a function of the volume of currency you've amassed, it is the quality of goods and services that the currency can purchase. When you've got a ton of highly educated people working as a team to accomplish something exceptional, what you get back is far more than what you put in.

Just ask Billie Beane, a guy who is a testament to what the upper limit of $200k/player gets you in terms of a baseball team. Yeah, you can beat the average for a little while by one exceptional administrator squeezing the system on the margins. But the only way you win that final game of the season is with a budget like what the Red Soxes or the Dodgers or Astros bring to bare.

And in that triumph, you do - in fact - get rich. You fill more stadium seats. You sell more cars or phones. You build more elaborate buildings. You send people to the bottom of the sea (without them getting crushed to death) and up to the moon.

At some point, you've got to put forward an investment. You can't run an advanced economy on poverty-level wages. And if you don't have those advances in medicine and engineering and logistics and technology, what the fuck kind of rich are you?

Do you want to pay competitive salaries in Heaven or run a robber barony in Hell?

You think they’re not?

When Starfield was released Bethesda was already part of Microsoft. Sure, it was mostly done but Microsoft should have realized it was a turd and either delayed the release to rebuild the game or simply cancelled it. Instead they chose to take money from their customers for a game that is clearly not worth the asking price.

Okay. Well they made sure Starfield didn't come out on the PS5, okay. and I promise you that didn't help their numbers at all. Okay. Okay

And please read comments more carefully next time. I did not say Microsoft was ever at fault, simply that they did not contribute anything to make Starfield better before release. Delays are a thing, but nobody thought it would be worth it to delay Starfield before release. If anything I'd bet money that Microsoft pushed the release

you seem to be blaming the workers for turning out flops but in general it's the managements lack of planning and micromanagement that's the general cause.

no one who's a developer, artist, designer wants to add micro transactions, that comes from top down because it's a revenue generator. they want to polish the games so they can be proud of the work, but are not given time.

executives are not the ones generally being let go and the ones that are will be cashing out from the acquisition. expect those IPs to get worse and have more enshittification because that's what makes money and that's all corpos care about.

you don't get a larian studios from laying off talent, you get it from good management and giving your talent time to deliver.

Blizzards CEO Mike Ybarra is out "by mutual agreement"

Not slighting the dismissal of those who didn't partake, don't get me wrong! Every situation has nuance, not denying that! I was referring to the overall culture which took root there, and from that the purely utilitarian observation that it's easier to change the mentality if you change the people (in one way or another).

It's funny to see 1900 people lose their jobs because they stayed instead of protesting the merger. If they're working at Microsoft/Activision/Blizzard, I promise you they don't have any real problems in life. Many of us told people that as soon as the merger went through they were going to axe a large portion of the staff, and we got "oh no that doesn't happen!".

So this, just like every merger before it, was a stupid idea to let pass, and I'm glad people are suffering for it, because maybe a little introspection will do them well.

But hey, can't really expect that much out of America, so oh well.